Sunday, November 11, 2012

Skyfall

Apparently it's a guy thing. James Bond that is.

We went to go see Skyfall yesterday - as 710 really wanted to go see it. He's a bigger Bond Daniel Craig fan that I am. And we really didn't see any of the big popcorn movies of 2012. No Spiderman, no Batman, nothing from Pixar.

But as a gender, Bond is a guy thing.

Women can swoon over Connery, Moore or Craig (c'mon, is anyone getting hot for Bronson or Dalton? Lazenby had a better shot!), but out of 100 people in the theater, five, maybe six were female.

It's a guy thing.

I have heard buzz on Skyfall, and it's gotten good buzz. As always, I did not read the review. I knew we'd go, though 710 offered to let me off the hook, but I wanted to be the good husband and initiate the outing.

I'd be hard-pressed to say I've seen more than two Bond films in the theater. This one and the last one being The Spy Who Loved Me, back in 1977. For the record, I think I like Diamonds are Forever, the best.

Oh, I've seen most of the films, just on pre-cable TV. I've seen a few of the newer ones on HBO.

I was a big fan of many of the earlier Bond themes - be it Shirley Bassey (well, not Moonraker), Lulu, Duran Duran and even Nancy Sinatra. In later years, Garbage did a good job, but not so much with Sheryl Crow, a-ha, and ugh uber auto-tuned Madonna. Horrid. Skyfall theme isn't great, but at least Adele is in the Shirley Bassey vein.

While I won't give any spoilers for the movie, I was actually happy to not have any of the campy scenes that many of the Bond films are known for. Of course you have to suspend disbelief at some things, but at least that cheesy dialogue was thankfully missing.

With one of the Bronson films, and a Bond girl named "Christmas", Bond utters "I thought Christmas only comes once a year", I groaned and clicked off the movie. I was done. Not only was it stupid line, it was poorly delivered - with an entier cheese plate.

Javier Barem is in the film and I like him, but he spots a hair-do only slightly less creepy than he did in No Country for Od Men. He's also wonderfully sexually ambiguous. While it had me chuckling for certain reasons, it had the straight guys in the audience chuckling uncomfortably. It worked on multiple levels.

But back to the guy thing: OMG, the tub-o-lard next to me who snuck in a sizable bag of Chex Mix and crunch-crunch-crunched his way through the movie was mucho distracting. It was all you could hear for one-third of the movie. I'll assume he finished the bag as opposed to stopped being hungry.

This isn't the 1960s or 70s Bond, this is product placement Bond: Jaguar, Heineken, Range Rover...etc. But once they showed the Astin Martin, the guys in the audience actually started clapping. ....for a car.

It's a guy thing.

I wasn't one of those guys, just so you know. I don't clap for cars. It's not like they clapped when he had his one and only martini - though the words 'shaken' or 'stirred' were never uttered.

It was a decent movie, probably not one you need to see in IMAX (we didn't), but it has Judi Dench and Albert Finney - and they usually make things better. Oh, and Lord Voldemort is in it too. Sorry, but I just can't see him as anything else when I look at Mr. Finnes.

More guy things....previews. Does there really need to be another Die Hard movie? I question if there ever should have been one let alone sequel after sequel. Or does there ever need to be another Quinten Tarentino movie? Every single preview - and there were plenty - had someone or someones going through a glass window, a glass ceiling or both. Trite! It's safe to say the fake glass industry is solid in Hollywood.

...and as always, for those keeping count: This is movie 10 for the year. We are one behind if you average one per month, but only two to go for the year goal......and we still have Lincoln, the Hobbit, Life of Pi and maybe Flight still to see.

Speaking of Flight, they gave us tickets to that instead of Skyfall....so while the latter movie is having a banner opening, our money did not go to their box-office. Oh well.